


As Above, So Below

by bluemoodblue



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (of a sort), Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Found Family, Gen, Jack Takano get fucked challenge, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Peter Nerdreyev rights, THEIA Soul (Penumbra Podcast), and now all there is are stories, ben lives au, dying city, something terrible happened in Hyperion, the make-believe and the real
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29610321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoodblue/pseuds/bluemoodblue
Summary: Who gets to tell the story of a dying city, hidden away beneath a dome - the ones looking down, wondering what might be? Or the ones looking up, unheard?Above, or below?Heads, or tails?
Relationships: Mick Mercury & Juno Steel, Peter Nureyev & Benzaiten Steel
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	As Above, So Below

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably be more of a prologue than a first chapter, but again, it’s just so hard to track things down on tumblr so it’ll be easier to find here if and when I decide to expand it.
> 
> This one comes from a lot of love for Bioshock and Hollow Knight (not that it will necessarily follow the plot of either), and the thought of the aftermath of Hyperion.
> 
> (“What a shock, blue has once more written an au where Ben lives and the Theia shows up” you might say, and to that I reply... yes I am predictable leave me alone)

**Above**

* * *

Everyone had a story about Hyperion.

They were fairy tales, almost all of them. They were the kind of narrative that promised something, a reward for the intrepid and the bold - staggering treasure, fantastic technology, a utopia of the best and brightest of humanity living perfect, unseen lives. There was no way to prove any of it. There was no way to _disprove_ any of it. And as long as the dark, metal dome stayed closed, as long as there was no proof positive of anything about the reality of Hyperion, the reality of Hyperion could be anything. That was the draw, right? The sealed city was somewhere else, greener pastures, the lottery win - the improbable fix for whatever was wrong in a person’s life. If the stories said more about the teller than the truth, that was hardly new.

Sarah Steel had a story about Hyperion. It took a whole two sentences to recite: “Hyperion is a dead city. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave it alone.”

That wasn’t the story Benzaiten wanted to hear before bed when he, hopeful, had recounted a schoolmate’s wild playground exaggeration. He pouted and Sarah smiled, kissed him on the forehead, and handed him his pill and a glass of water.

“Not even a little bit of treasure?” He took the medicine.

“Not even.” She took the glass from his hand when he was done.

“No cool robots _at all?_ ” Treasure, Benten decided, he could take or leave. An absence of cool robots when his classmate had practically guaranteed them seemed a step too far.

His mother’s smile was very still. “None.”

“Guess that means not everyone’s happy all the time there, either,” he grumbled, burrowing into his blanket while Sarah tucked him in. He wouldn’t be happy all the time in a place that couldn’t even keep its own promises - what a letdown.

It wouldn’t occur to him until later - years and miles later - that Sarah was quiet that night. Her answers were as small as she could make them, and in hindsight she’d seemed smaller, too. Diminished and struggling with something that a younger Benten never even noticed. “No one’s happy all the time, sweetheart. Not anywhere.”

Ben was never good at leaving well enough alone, though, and it wasn’t the only time the lost city came up. He couldn’t have said then or later what he was really looking for by pressing the issue; maybe he was just curious because he couldn’t get a real answer. Maybe he wanted to know what Sarah Steel would look for in a fairy tale. Maybe he just knew that she would tell the story best.

She was more patient about it than he had any right to expect, with the way her temper could get. Benten would ask, Sarah would grimace, Benten would tease, Sarah would tease back just on the right side of sharp. It was the push and pull between them that he was used to; one of those weird things she decided to dig her heels in over. And then he asked again, because Benzaiten Steel was contrary by nature. He was pretty sure that was something about him she appreciated even when it annoyed her - he was pretty sure he got that from her.

Benten never did get a real answer. Social services showed up at their door before Sarah had the chance to change her mind, and then there were so many more important questions to ask.

Living in the group home meant he was too old for stories. No one said so; it was more that bedtime stories stopped happening and the caretakers told him he was very grownup for taking the change as well as he did, and the thoughts mixed and melded in his head somewhere. He didn’t think about Hyperion again until years and two roommate changes later, when a wispy kind of boy with dark eyes and dark hair was pushed in front of him and introduced.

He didn’t want anything to do with Benten at first - he didn’t want anything to do with anyone, ever, spending long hours by the door like he was waiting for someone to remember they’d left him there and come back. That wasn’t all that strange; everyone thought the group home was just temporary until it wasn’t anymore. Benten sat close enough to be heard and prattled away like the annoying little shit he was good at being, and eventually - probably to slow the deluge of words - the kid answered.

No one ever came back for Peter Nureyev.

Benten wouldn’t tell him he was fine with that because whoever would leave Peter behind didn’t appreciate him enough to begin with; it was a nice thought that wouldn’t heal that hurt. Time - in general and together, specifically - was much better medicine. Peter taught Benten to steal, sneaking trinkets from the caretaker’s desk drawers, and Benten taught Peter to dance, up on the rooftop where it really felt like flying. They both dreamed about where they would go if they could go anywhere, and the list was tacked onto their wall with pages of additions.

Hyperion made the list. Peter wrote it in himself.

Benten had been skeptical when he spotted it. “Ma always said it wasn’t worth thinking about.”

“Has she ever been?” And he had a point - Sarah had not been. Sarah and Benten had never so much as stepped foot anywhere within a planet’s distance of Mars. “Nobody knows what’s in there. Nobody’s been able to get in since they closed the dome.”

Benten narrowed his eyes at Peter from where he was laying on his bed across the room. “Is this a _nerd_ thing.”

“It’s not a nerd thing.” Peter tossed a paper ball at him from where he sat with a huge, nerd book spread open before him, not even trying to hide the smile on his face. “It’s interesting. I know you think so too, you stayed up to watch that conspiracy theory show about it.”

“Do you want to unearth some _relics_.”

Peter snorted. “It’s not old enough for relics. It closed when you were four - unless you’re trying to call yourself an ancient antique?”

Benten tossed the paper ball back. “I am unknowable.”

“You’re a nuisance is what you are,” Peter muttered, and as long as he kept using words like ‘nuisance’ in casual conversation, Benten would keep calling him a nerd. Peter looked across the room, and his glasses made his eyes big and bright. “Don’t you want to know what they’re _hiding?_ ” And then, hastily tacked-on: “It could be worth a fortune.”

Fortune wasn’t Hyperion’s draw for Peter; it was the draw he thought he should have, that he thought other people would expect him to have, but Benten knew better. Hyperion’s draw for Peter was the same as Benten’s: curiosity.

A dangerous thing, Benten thought. Curiosity killed, or so they said, and Benten didn’t have a history of getting satisfying answers. He looked up at the handwritten name on a list of places that all seemed fantastic and otherworldly from one half of a room in a group home. Maybe that’s why Sarah tried to warn him - but Benzaiten Steel had always been contrary by nature.

“I could be talked into it.”

* * *

**Below**

* * *

Everyone in Hyperion had a story.

They weren’t good stories. They were leftover pieces and parts, like the people they came from - like the city they lived in. Put enough of them together into a patchwork quilt and someone might’ve had a cunning, interpretive mockery of what Hyperion used to be. More likely, they would have ended up with bloodied fingers from the attempt, too many sharp edges and abrupt endings to handle safely.

Sometimes the circle of children took turns telling them.

Sasha pulled Annie around by the hand for months. She’d stopped looking for the rest of her family by the time she found Juno; he didn’t know if that serious, hard look in her eyes had always been there, but he’d never once seen it break in the time he’d known her. It held while she introduced the shadow of a girl hiding behind her, when she told him to come with her, when she led the way to the defunct Vixen Valley for him to make a deal with Vicky for somewhere to sleep.

If Sasha used to be anyone else, only Annie would ever know; she didn’t talk about before unless she had to, and if she had to she talked about facts. She could list the bolt-holes she and Annie found in the first few days of outright chaos. She remembered watching news reports in the living room, counting the districts reporting malfunction outbreaks while the rest of the family debated whether or not it was too late to run. She remembered the day the dome closed... and that was all she would say about it. Sasha would have anyone believe that she didn’t save room for sentimentality, and anyone would believe it if not for Annie’s hand in hers. Sasha could never be as cold as she wished she was while Annie was there.

Puck saw someone lose it. The first time he told the story, he started it just like that: self-assured, almost bragging, with the wicked grin of a kid on the playground who has something impressive to share. Then he tried actually telling it, and that grin slid off his face. It never crossed their minds to give him grief for it, because none of them were going by playground rules anymore.

He’d had an aunt, or a distant cousin - he didn’t remember where the connection was and one downside of being the last one standing was no one else to ask - and she was an artist. She was good, he thought he remembered. The family said so, and Puck didn’t care enough to have an opinion - and she had a nice house and a big studio. She just wasn’t good _enough_ , and she could never let that go.

The technology was going to make her better, the aunt-or-cousin told them. She’d looked so happy, but Puck remembered wondering why she sounded like she thought something in her needed fixing. He didn’t ask; it would have been weird, they weren’t that close. She only had it on for about a month when she stopped using canvases and started painting everything else, smiling and explaining that she was making the world more beautiful. They took it off of her and she kept painting the world while it fell apart around her.

Rita’s mom probably had a bomb on her when she disappeared. That was what Rita claimed, anyway. She was met with absolute silence when she said so, and it was anyone’s guess if she even noticed.

She didn’t like the new technology from the start. The grimace on her face said everything, and the way she set a tablet in front of Rita and said “and what do you make of _that_ , Rita-darling” said everything else. Her mom was always the type who liked to share bad news with a big smile - local gossip, the ruin of government officials, a poor bet - all shared with absolute delight and anticipation of watching the crash and burn of the aftermath. Bad news shared with a frown was the kind of bad news that she sometimes had to crash and burn personally.

Rita didn’t much like what she saw on the tablet. They were limited design schematics, probably already out of date, and she didn’t even bother asking her mom where she got them because there was no way she’d get an honest answer, anyway. But she didn’t like what she saw, and she was honest about that. “That’s too much programming to stuff into a person,” she’d simplified (her mother was a firecracker, not a techie, so simple was usually better), and her mom nodded and said no more about it. The next thing Rita heard, they were going to leave the city just as soon as she got back from an errand, and Rita was to have absolutely everything she thought she’d want to take with her packed and ready to go by the door. Her mom had her big, bulky, “errand” coat on - Rita had seen it before, usually a few hours before news reports about explosions and fire - and that said everything that needed saying.

Rita waited, shuttle board pass already secured around her wrist. There were no explosions and no one at the door. “The worst part’s the not knowing for sure,” Rita confided. “Cause if you know for sure, you can stop looking over your shoulder all the time.”

The going story was the Kanagawas got dumped into the thick of it with cameras strapped to their chests and footage streaming to somewhere off-planet. Everyone said they heard it from someone else, and the twins weren’t talking; Cecil would giggle and Cassandra would roll her eyes, and neither of them would say anything.

When Juno was alone, he thought about the station.

He remembered both of his hands being held, one by someone bigger than him and the other just his size, and the way the light streamed in through the windows and between the crowds. He remembered a woman knelt down in front of him, attaching a boarding pass to someone else’s wrist. He remembered how her own wrist pass was pushed farther up her arm as she dug through her purse, and then the suitcases, until the contents of someone else’s life were strewn across the ground for people to carefully avoid or callously step on. Juno didn’t remember her name, didn’t even remember her face in a way that mattered, but he remembered that expression - the way his mother looked at him when she boarded the shuttle and he didn’t.

And the screaming, when hands that were just his size reached back for him.

(When he remembered the heavy hand on his shoulder, the one that walked him back through the station and into the midday sunlight of a bustling Hyperion, it was always with the barely-there impression of a coin: flashing in the air as it spun, slow to fall.)

That was never a story he told. Juno told the story of the day Jack Takano died, when an overloaded Theia user got just a little too close and began the fall of Hyperion in earnest. It wasn’t a very good story. The others always listened with rapt attention anyway.

No one knew what happened to Mick, or his family; Mick never said. That wasn’t what he liked to talk about, late at night and huddled around in their circle in the Vixen Valley, when being alone was the worst thing any of them could be.

Mick liked remembering, and he had an unparalleled memory for everything he thought was important: the taste of ice cream on a hot day, riding a bike on a clear road, school and knowing where home was, grocery stores and restaurants, toys and games and the time to enjoy them. The color of the sky - the real sky, not just slate-grey shadow so high up that it might just be the sky anyway and the universe around them might just be empty. What stars looked like, when you could see them.

His favorite thing to talk about was about the day that big lid would crack open and let all of the light back in, and how they would be able to see _everything_ \- whole planets of other people to meet and things to try. It was going to be worth it, all of this was going to be worth it, for that moment; they just needed to stick around a little longer.

There would be a moment where all of them were quiet, and then someone would break it by groaning or telling Mick to get his head back under the dome with the rest of them. That was mostly just a way of pushing past the big, choking want that they were all left wrapped up in; there was a reason Mick’s stories were always left until last, after all. They wanted to believe Mick so much that it hurt.

 _Juno_ wanted to believe Mick so much that it hurt. “What do you say, Jayjay,” Mick would lean over and whisper while the others dragged themselves to their corners of the dancehall-turned-refuge. “When that dome opens, you wanna come with me?”

And Juno would shove aside his bitterness and skepticism for just a few minutes.

“I could be talked into it.”


End file.
